46 metal bed. The sign lists ten "security regulations" that the house torturers addressed to those they interrogated. No.3 says, "Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolu- tion." No.6 says, "While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all." No. 10 is redundant: it says, "If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge." Tuol Sleng was turned into a mu- seum in the early eighties, during the Vietnamese occupation. It was mod- elled on the Nazi concentration-camp museums in Eastern Europe, and it is called a "genocide" museum. But the regime of death that the Khmer Rouge visited on Cambodia does not properly fit the legal definition of genocide: "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Although some minority groups were singled out for special persecution in Pol Pot time, the crime as a whole was the systematic mass murder of Cambodian people by the Cambodian state. As in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, the slaughter was committed in the name of Com- munism, and to say that it was not genocide does not diminish the offense. If anything, killing one's own is even more incomprehensible than the us- th killin . f " th " Wh " " versus- em goo ers. en us r ." >> ". :=:: .. i:-: i:=: ." K: . 't- "0, ,: .;.: i \1 ? 'f q . .:: o t:: ;,.. . r'" l *' ;o:':: " c. t / ,ot<i{' ;0::". .-::c:. ." .../ L ....t. t ' î , ,iJ' Ä( '}F:..:!(#}<: .A ...;:;( _..-.-...i-;".- "".......... kills "us," it's a form of national suicide. Nearly everybody who was killed at Tuol Sleng was a Khmer Rouge opera- tive or sympathizer. A year after com- ing to power, the Khmer Rouge had already effectively wiped out urban and educated classes, abolished money, and produced a population composed exclusively of Party cadres and forced laborers, without schools, medical care, Buddhist pagodas, or even family kitch- ens. And yet Pol Pot remained dis- satisfied. Revolution, he believed, had to remain in continuous struggle with counter-revolution, and as he searched for counter-revolutionaries his paranoia was boundless. The rough numbers from T uol Sleng sketch the curve: two hundred "enemies" processed in 1975; two thousand two hundred and fifty in 1976; more than six thousand in 1977; and at least ten thousand in 1978. If the Khmer Rouge can be said to have had a coherent principle, it was, Purge or be purged. "You know, at the time, I have a few dogs," my driver, Sok Sin, told me. "But they kill all the dogs, because they always spy; they always under your bed." He was describing life in a labor camp after he had been evacuated from Phnom Penh, along with the rest of its nearly two million inhabitants, right after the Khmer Rouge takeover. I didn't understand why the Khmer Rouge had n', ' '. -,_ _. } ';;; ;" N o'f; ^ ", " :: . : 4.- lf '" 0'0' -"" '00)1 : : ji ir "O, ' : "(: I :, : .: ';, :' ;: ;;"f: =-:: .. ",: . ..";'-.;-..-" :,è:' 0-' ,:0 , ',:, . .. J1 ',-, , ,. >, ....': .. '- "Like everyone else these days, we've made most of our ftiends through our kids. " THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 10,1998 killed dogs. By way of an explanation, Sok Sin told me about the time one of his brothers came to visit him in the labor camp. (The visit was possible be- cause this brother worked for the Khmer Rouge.) Sok Sin and his brother slept in the same room, on beds made of bamboo slats. One of the slats in Sok Sin's bed was broken, and he reached out in the darkness to adjust it. "One of my hands touched a Khmer Rouge- under my bed," he said. "They want to spy when my brother comes, what he tells us and what we tell him." I still didn't understand. "Why did they kill all the dogs?" "Because," he said impatiently, "easy to come to your bed, come to your house, underneath your bed." I understood. Dogs like to sleep un- der beds, and the Khmer Rouge liked to sneak under beds for nighttime spying. The Khmer Rouge killed the dogs so they could take the dogs' place. On the wall behind the voter-regi- stration table at the T uol Sleng polling station, a mural depicted a Khmer Rouge killing field. Somebody had covered the mural with a blue plastic sheet, but the left edge remained ex- posed, showing the figure of a man, in profile, raising a club over his head. A woman named Uy Srem, who was standing by the door, holding a card marked "#6," told me that she was fifty-four years old and had lived next door to the torture museum since 1982 but had never come in before. "I didn't want to be re- \.. r'" minded of Pol Pot time," she said. Perhaps she also meant that she didn't need to be reminded, be- cause, after a few minutes of si- lence, she said, "None of my rela- tives were killed here. They were killed somewhere else." Then an election official called out, "Number Six," and Uy Srem . d " I ' C I ;>" sa!, t s my turn now. an go. T HERE is a play called "The Terrible but Unfinished Story of N orodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia," written by the French postmodernist literary theorist Hélène Cixous. It's a his- torical drama, and one of its devices is the classical use of a chorus. At the point in the play when Sihan- ouk first allies himself with the